Louise+Allman


 * SUMMARY: Louise Allman, age 25, died February 5, 1929 after an illegal abortion perpetrated in Chicago, allegedly by midwife Amelia Juarez.**

On January 29, 1929, Glasgow native Louise Allman, nee Yucius, age 25, underwent an abortion at the home of Amelia K. Jaruez, a midwife. The address is also listed as a medical facility, so evidently she provided care to legitimate patients there as well.

On February 5, Louise died, leaving behind a husband, Stanley.

Jaruez was held by the coroner on February 23, and indicted for homicide by a grand jury, but she was acquitted on July 2 for reasons not indicated in the sources. Reasons for acquittal could be technicalities, including the possibility that the abortion should have been considered a legal abortion, or because the person didn't actually perpetrate the abortion. Without further documentation, it's impossible to know.

Keep in mind that things that things we take for granted, like antibiotics and blood banks, were still in the future. For more about abortion in this era, see [|Abortion in the 1920s].

Abortion-rights groups dismiss post-legalization deaths with a flippant assertion that "all surgery has risks," but do not accept that the same was true prior to legalization. Surgery was riskier then, so abortion was riskier as well. As the 20th century progressed, all maternal mortality, including abortion mortality, fell as medical care improved. Antibiotics and blood transfusions -- along with overall better health due to increasing prosperity -- deserve the credit for falling mortality, which was hardly caused retroactively by the 1973 //Roe vs. Wade// Supreme Court ruling striking down all the nation's abortion laws.

No doubt there was quackery prior to legalization -- but such quackery persists today. Removing the threat of jail for any but the most egregious behavior does not provide motivation to run a tight ship. Three erstwhile criminal abortionists that I know of -- Benjamin Munson, Milan Vuitch, and Jesse Ketchum -- didn't lose a single abortion patient until after legalization made them less fearful of repercussions and thus far more careless. Each went on to kill two legal abortion patients, not out of simple surgical complications, but due to appalling quackery.

If abortion-rights groups were as concerned with women's lives as they are about the Holy Grail of "access," women could only benefit. If only half of the effort put into investigating and trying to shut down prolife pregnancy help centers were put into investigating and trying to shut down seedy abortion mills, only abortionists would suffer. Women would benefit. Whose side are they really on?

It's time we got real about how little is different between illegal and legal abortion practice: the main difference is how much risk of being shut down or sent to prison the safe-and-legal abortionist faces.

For more on pre-legalization abortion, see [|The Bad Old Days of Abortion]

Source:
 * [|Homicide in Chicago Interactive]

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